Deserved props to Baltimore Crime for it’s not-the-first-time receipt of City Paper’s “Best of Baltimore” blog for 2007, but also, a surprise while browsing through the awards — my advisor at Towson University, and favorite creative writing professor, Jack Carneal, featured in an article in the A&E section: “WHO IS THE WORLD?”

During the school year, Carneal, 40, is a lecturer in the English department at Towson University. Local musicians and fans might recognize him as the longtime drummer behind erstwhile City Paper contributor Ned Oldham in the Anomoanon. Most recently, though, Carneal is being praised and put in the cross hairs for his Yaala Yaala imprint, a Drag City-distributed label through which he is releasing music he recorded and procured during a year spent living in the rural town of Bougouni, Mali, while his wife studied rural education on a grant from 1999 and 2000. The first three Yaala Yaala releases–Bougouni Yaalali, Daouda Dembele, and Pekos/Yoro Diallo–are dispatches from and journeys into an instantly provocative world of rippling rhythms and inescapable forward drive.

Bougouni Yaalali, in fact, is a set of field recordings Carneal made casually on MiniDisc. “One day I was walking around and I saw a friend of mine, who invited me to walk with him,” Carneal recalls. “We ended up at a checkers [match]–these guys were just sitting outside in the shade playing checkers. So we watched them play, and one of the guys had an ngoni.

“I guess it was comparable to going to a party and having somebody strumming on a guitar,” Carneal continues. “He was playing the ngoni and started passing it around, and I ended up recording a few guys playing.”

Rock on, professor!